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The Board Room

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David, I have spent a career in television and then in digital. You are missing the big point.

Your friend was right, the internet (whether over tablets or whatever) is electronic, instant, dynamic. Print is static, delayed, fixed and linear output. But more important, the people who power that world think in those terms.

They think in terms of subscribers bought and continuously showing up on your door everyday. They think of long form, slow, pondered, crafted words.

The electronic purveyors of information think in terms of constant audience competition and fast but not always perfect information flow. If it’s wrong we'll fix it next hour. These kinds of differences create cultural imperatives that are simply unacceptable to each other inside these organizations. And that's before you even get to the turf wars.

Remember Olivetti the typewriter company? Anyone remember the IBM Selectric. In their end days, these were amazing machines. Almost type-set quality output with electronic memories. Typewriting was never so good...just before it died.

In the late '80's you could not cross the street in New York without almost getting hit by a bicycle messenger. They were everywhere. More everyday. Better faster cheaper. Until they were gone. Not fast enough. Not cheap enough to compete with fax and email.

I'll give the CD another five years before it is more or less completely replaced by files and chips.

Some magazines are better than ever today. Most magazine websites are awful yet the technology to bring them to life electronically on the web has been getting cheaper and easier for 10 years now, but where has this taken the magazine publishing world? Tablets won't change that.

The funnel, gatekeeper economics of the print ad markets are also in their end days. Electronic buying and selling of dozens of competing electronic media choices will pick the carcass clean.

Print as you know it, is dead. Trying to make a tablet the savior of the print publishing business, as John Cleese once said, "is like fighting a land war in China."